The Butler County Press

THINK ABOUT By F. A. WALKER

NEVER TOO LATE

A prominent churchman in New York died a short time ago at the age of sixty-five.

He had risen to bishopric from the position of an obscure rector in fifteen years.

Up to the time he was fifty he had never preached a sermon.

A lot of men think they are past the possibility of progress when they have hit the half-century mark.

We condemn ourselves to old age when we have just begun to know enough to live.

A man of fifty who has lived properly and spent his time usefully and well is just about ready to do something worth while.

Instead of that, however, the most of us celebrate our fiftieth birthday by soliloquizing on the idea that we are over the peak of life's hill, that we have started on the down grade and that from then on the descent will be increasingly rapid.

There is no need of growing old at fifty, of relinquishing interest, quelling ambition and retiring from effort.

Thousands of men have done the best and greatest work of their lives after the half-century mark was well behind them.

Michael Angelo, the greatest artist, the noblest sculptor, the most inspired architect that ever lived, painted "The Last Judgment," the greatest picture in the world, after he was sixty and designed St. Peter's, the masterpiece of all the earth's architecture, after he was seventy.

Over the device of an old man sitting beside an hour glass, he wrote the inspiring inscription: Ancora Imparo ("I am still learning").

Goethe, who finished one of the masterpieces of literature after he was seventy, had as the motto of his last full years, "A man's activity should increase with age." He did not believe in rusting out. He believed in wearing out while doing the best work of his whole career.

Sometime mankind will come to realize that growing old is a useless and needless occupation. That the easy chair in the chimney corner might much better give place to the work table and the continuance of productiveness.

The time will come when men will not grow old at all. When we shall live to a real old age of perhaps a hundred without thinking that we are past our period of usefulness. The best built machine in the world is the human body and if given half a chance it would last far past the three score and ten that the Psalmist fixed for its survival.

Work seldom kills a man or wears him out.

Thinking, if you except the kind of thinking we call worrying, never made a man old. It is the excesses of life, the intemperances of living that turn us into old men and women and unfit us for further existence.

Live right and you will live long.

Don't grow old before your time.

Fifty is no time to begin to feel aged.

At seventy-five, perhaps, a man might begin to ease off a little. Man ought not to be less efficient in wearing qualities than his brothers, the animals, and there are plenty of them that live past the century mark without perceptible decrease of activity.

The man that stops at fifty is just a quitter and you don't want to be in that class.

Take a leaf from the book of the bishop and say, "It's never too late to begin."

(C. by McClure Newspaper Syndicate.)